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But I Didn’t Do It!

By Stanley Fish March 20, 2007 10:10 pmMarch 20, 2007 10:10 pm

Stanley Fish has written an Op-Ed for The Times that appears in print and online today. Post a comment about it below. — The Editors

Emboldened by the State of Virginia’s apology for slavery — the measure passed both houses unanimously — some Georgia lawmakers are in the process of introducing a similar resolution in their legislature. The reasoning behind the apology movement is straightforward: a great wrong was done for centuries to men and women who contributed in many ways to the prosperity of their country and were willing to die for it in battle; it’s long past time to say we’re sorry… Read the Column »

Acknowledgment of past failures, recognition of the need to learn from past failures, and promises to do better are all appropriate responses to history. Apologies, on the other hand, are insufficient. BFS

I completely agree both with you and the first comment. This is why I refuse to ever make the “but I didn’t vote for Bush argument”. Like it or not, he is a representative of us and we chose him no matter you or I voted for.

Stanley Fish’s argument only touches part of the issue of slavery and its place in American political memory. Slavery is part of a larger issue about the place of the Civil War in American political history. We continue to see the appearance of films (Cold Mountain, Ken Burns’ documentary) in which African-Americans are largely absent from the narrative. We continue to see controversies over the display of the Confederate battle flag, the flag adopted by the KKK and the segregationist defiance of civil rights, on license plates and state flags. We are subject to prominent members of the radical right glorifying the “lost cause,” which upon historical examination includes the insistence on the part of the dozens of Southern Secessionist Commissioners such as Stephen Hale and Andrew Calhoun that the continuation of slavery in the South was not enough, that it had to be extended to new territories to protect the “superiority of the white race over the black race.” As long as these developments occur with the deafening silence of American politicians and media, we “are still there” and an apology for the past is only the first step. The next is an apology for how the present continues to disfigure the past.

Michael T. Gibbons
Lutz, FL

Michael Gibbons teaches political theory at the University of South Florida.

Your misplaced analogy to the judicial principle of stare decisis is ironically apt. Does a court that overrules a prior ruling “apologize” for the prior incorrect opinion? Surely harm was done to those who altered their lives to comply with that prior (incorrect) ruling. But, of course, it does not apologize.

I suggest that you look at some of the work of ordinary language philosophy. An apology is incomplete without both a subject, “I apologize” and an indirect object “to you.” The more diffuse either the subject (“The State of Georgia”) or the indirect object (“those offended by slavery”), the less meaningful the apology. Believe it or not, grammar matters. I’m not saying that Mr. Fish made a mistake; I’m just saying that a mistake was made.

Now, about big apologies like this, I wonder if Washington has ever apologized for our, yes our, treatment of the American Indians. But recognition and contrition for past atrocities committed in our good name is not fitted to the shallow pool of politics; and as an earlier Fish column was headlined, “politics means always having to say you’re sorry.”

Thanks for a succinct and accurate account of how perpetual social organizations transcend the individuals who populate them at any given moment. We participate in them. They could not exist without the people through whom they come alive. But they are not us, and most assuredly we are not the organizations.

This is one of the great mysteries of the corporation (a particular instance of social organization). Those who happen to be stewards of the trust at a given moment (such as the Georgian legislators of 2007) are not the legislature. It is something apart from (perhaps greater, perhaps less than) them. And it is not entirely possible for the present stewards to distance themselves from the acts of previous stewards. We inherit the bad with the good. The sins of the fathers are visited unto the third and fourth generation, to use Biblical language.

Moral responsibility is often diffused in social organizations. But it is seldom, if ever, the case that all are absolved because there is no clear candidate for blame. What is true with contemporaneous responsibility is, to some extent, true across time. We benefit from the heroic accomplishments of Madison, Adams, Washington, and Jefferson. We also share some of the responsibility for Jackson’s Trail of Tears and attrocities perpetrated by others. The sons of robbers cannot pretend to some moral purity while they live a lavish life made possible by their fathers’ misdeeds.

Tommie Williams and Glenn Richardson really do miss the point don’t they? Of course, they didn’t do the buying and selling, the splitting of families, the lynching of “uppities,” the beating of runaways, and they didn’t own the slaves. For that matter, the people who suffered the inhumanity of slavery aren’t around to hear the apologies either. And, in fact, some members of those legislatures may well be from families who were on the receiving end of slavery’s cruelties. What Virginia, and perhaps Georgia, lawmakers are doing is symbolic.

Humans are creatures of symbolism; it’s our big trick. Language in itself is pure symbolism and what we do with it often involves creating more symbols. To apologize for past wrongs done by an organization to which you now belong, is partially a symbolic recognition that evil was done, and an acceptance of the organization’s continued responsibility for the results of that evil. But it is also, implicitly, a statement that any future actions that perpetuate the results of that ancient evil are in themselves wrong too.

Mr. Williams and Mr. Richardson might be naively sincere in their statements, but, there are those saying the same things whose motives are to protect the racist class differences that continue to exist in America. When we underfund education for dark-skinned children, when we use ethnic profiling, when we deny people access to housing in certain areas based on color alone, when we discuss a Presidential candidate’s color, we perpetuate the terrible results of slavery. And set up future generations for having to perform the symbolic act of apologizing for us.

Thank you for another great column. I am swayed by your case that some institutions are compelled to take responsibility for actions in the past, regardless of whether their current members were involved. I am not sure that this could be said for any institution – does the same hold for the executive branch of government, for schools and universities, or retail chains? But their involvement with the law, indeed a project that precedes and outlasts individuals, make this a powerful argument not just about the courts, but equally about the Georgia legislature. So you indeed make clear how we could, in the Georgia case, have a legitimate apologist without recourse to personal responsibility. But does your argument not also need to clarify to whom a possible apology for slavery would, in the present case, be issued? It does not look as if the present-day descendants of the victims of slavery are, in any helpful sense, the members of an institution. For moral purposes, at least conceived in your appropriately rigorous terms, it is presumably their ancestry which ties together children and grand-children of the victims of past crimes. But is their biological descent attractive as a way to think of such groups as the beneficiaries of an apology? I am certainly as curious about the politics of the issue, but I don’t think the moral question has been quite resolved as yet.

I think apologies are the least that Americans can do in relation to slavery. This country and the colonies were founded on on a slavery economy.
I believe the American Dream was founded and perpetuated by the enslavement and discrimination of black people.
I think that since the Supreme Court for many years endorsed slavery and second-class citizenship, now this same court can find it in their thinking as well as in their hearts to continue affirmative action for black people.
Ruth Beazer

Your recent New York Times column concerning official apologies for slavery and a common objection to making such apologies – what you describe as the objection that “the wrong people would be apologizing to the wrong people” – caused me to reflect anew about the subject.

My prior reflections on this subject were about apologies of a personal nature. Your column has helped me focus upon the distinctive official apology, the apology of a state legislature.

Now that I have examined the distinction, I confess that my views still reflect somewhat my response to the question of a personal apology for slavery. Although I abhor the institution of slavery and find that its history in the United States, followed by over a century of official racial discrimination after the end of slavery, is a shameful blight upon our nation’s image of itself as a beacon of freedom and equality, I feel neither any responsibility for this history nor any cause to apologize for it. Although I have lived in a former slave holding state (I never displayed my university diploma because Alabama Governor George Wallace signed it), none of my ancestors were slaveowners nor did they profit in any manner from the institution of slavery. In fact, none of my ancestors were residents of the United States until decades after slavery was abolished here.

You argue persuasively that the question of institutional responsibility is different, and I see now that it is. But your arguments do not seem compelling.

Initially troubling to me, although not central to your case, is your endorsement of the institutional “we” by the Supreme Court which you argue appropriately acknowledges the justices’ responsibility for the court’s history. My trouble is you implicit assertion that a legislature is in some institutional sense like a court.

The court, I submit, is such a fundamentally different institution from a legislative body as to not be appropriate for comparison to any legislature, state or national. A decision by the Supreme Court is not merely an adjudication of a dispute. It is also a resolution of an often widely disputed point of law, intended to guide lower courts and legal counselors in avoiding and resolving future disputes. The institutional “we,” even when used by justices citing decades old precedents written by earlier members of the court, underscores both the institutional nature of the court’s decisions and the foundation of our legal system being a government of laws and not of men. Ofcourse, professor, you know all of this and probably could say it much more eloquently.

A state legislature is fundamentally different from a court. Unlike a court which exists to settle matters of law, a legislature represents the people of the state. It enacts laws and speaks as the collective voice of the people of the state or at least a majority of the people.

Granted, the statements of individual Georgia legislators which you cited in your column and to which you took exception were wrongheaded and worthy of illustration. One instance was a statement reflecting one legislator’s wrong-headed view that the matter being debated should be decided based upon the legislators collective sense of their personal responsibility (as opposed to the collective responsibility of its citizens or the legislature’s own institutional responsibility). The other instance was a denial that current members of the Georgia Legislature have any responsibility for the errors of their predecessors in office. I agree with you that both modes of reasoning are wrong.

But what you miss in your analysis is that state legislatures are by design and creation intended to reflect the opinions and the wills of the people who elected them, almost invariably people who elected or re-elected them within the past four years. Georgia is a very different place now than it was a century and a half ago when its people owned slaves and its Legislature sanctioned and enforced the institution of slavery. Sure there doubtlessly still are more than a few Georgians who mourn for the days of race separation if not for slavery. But Georgia is also a much more populous, cosmopolitan place with many citizens who, like me, never owned nor had ancestors who owned slaves or approved the existence of slavery, people like me who abhor the existence of slavery anywhere and who feel no responsibility or cause to apologize for it.

Georgia legislators have a responsibility to reflect upon the current conscience and responsibility of its populace in considering its votes and its pronouncements especially when it comes to so weighty a matter as an institutional apology for slavery on behalf of the people of Georgia.

If I were a citizen of Georgia and the state were populated by like-minded people, the Legislature would express its official shame that slavery ever existed within Georgia’s borders and that its elected representatives ever sanctioned slavery and enacted and compelled the enforcement of laws which treated human beings like chattel. The Legislature would declare its intention and enact laws to ensure that no discrimination on grounds of race shall ever again be permitted within Georgia’s borders.

But it would be wrong to adopt an official expressions apology for slavery on behalf of a people who have had no responsibility for its existence, for its maintenance and who in no way profited by it. Surely there was a time when Georgians and their legislators, and the citizens and legislators of other slaveholding states, should have apologized for their inhumanity toward Africans. But that time seems now to have long passed.

For if that time has not passed, then we all as American citizens and our representatives in all branches and levels of government must be forever apologetic for the framers of our national constitution who, in order to cobble together our nation, permitted individual states to determined whether their citizens could own slaves and permitted their representatives in the national Congress to be determined in part by the number of slaves in each state. Shall we apologize for the existence of our nation? I won’t.

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Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012, he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution” will be published in 2014.